Event Stresses Alternative Jobs

Google and Apple were among the companies and organizations that visited Boylston Hall on Saturday to woo students to careers outside of law, medicine, and finance.

The conference, called Diversity in Careers Awareness (DICA) and designed to help students make contacts in industries like public health and public interest, featured representatives for different fields who participated in one-hour panel discussions, the first of which was focused on education.

Joshua Biber, a representative from Teach for America, talked about his own experiences of going to a career fair at Brown University and realizing that he did not like anything there. Because of his interest in “empowering marginalized communities,” Biber said, he began working for the teaching program after he graduated in 2004.

Elizabeth S. Q. Goodman ’08, who attended the event, said she was thinking about joining Teach for America for one year before entering graduate school. She said that she had always been interested in teaching but didn’t know whether she wanted to pursue a career in mathematics or education.

She added that joining Teach for America would be “an experiment” but that she would take the experience seriously to gain training in education.

Philip G. Parham ’09, one of the organizers of the event, said that the event was meant to counteract the fact that at Harvard there is “a lot of focus on law, medicine, i-banking, and consulting.”

Last year, a Crimson survey found that 58 percent of Harvard men and 43 percent of women entering the workforce went into the financial sector.

Dhaval Chadha ’08, another organizer, said that many of the organizations featured at the Saturday event simply do not have the resources or manpower to compete with the financial institutions and consulting firms that currently have a major presence on campus.

He said he hoped that DICA would help raise awareness on campus about these organizations and serve as a place to “point students in the right direction” when they are considering career options.

Chadha said that DICA will be holding more events in the future and that he hoped that similar events would become more permanent on campus.

DICA is an initiative of the Harvard organization Students Taking on Poverty, and is supported by the Office of Career Services, the Center for Public Interest Careers, the Bureau of Study Counsel, the Office for the Arts, and the Phillips Brooks House Association.